home · Networks · Google has developed a way to remove watermarks from images and protect against it. Google has developed an algorithm to automatically remove watermarks. And protection from it

Google has developed a way to remove watermarks from images and protect against it. Google has developed an algorithm to automatically remove watermarks. And protection from it

How to remove watermarks from a picture is a question asked by everyone who wants to place high-quality pictures on their website, but does not have the required amount to pay for the services of the paid photo hosting service on which they are located. Below I have provided a whole guide on how to remove watermarks from a picture or image using or without Photoshop.

Let's say you need to prepare a presentation within an hour, but you don't have enough images to complete it. You send your wishes to the design department and have the right to believe that your wishes are clear. You urgently need to make adjustments to the received images, but for some reason, you cannot access the originals.

Be that as it may, the reason why you need to remove watermarks from a photo varies. Maybe you urgently need to fix your presentation, as already mentioned, or maybe you just feel sorry for spending a small amount of money to buy a unique picture on a photo hosting site. In this case, I certainly would not recommend wasting your time on removing watermarks, but paying money and doing more serious things, since your time also has a certain value.

How to remove watermarks from a picture

It takes a lot of effort to remove watermarks from an image, so if you're reading this guide, then you've considered the pros and cons and decided that removing the watermark is worth the time and effort!

FreeImages

Another equally useful photo hosting site that allows you to search for high resolution photos. In the example above, I was looking for an image of a person who is thoughtful or angry. We type in the search query “Angry man” - and we can see some pretty interesting pictures with similar meanings, so I don’t have to edit them in Photoshop:

Sometimes more quick solution problems will come in open door than to break into a closed one. Consider alternative sources if the goal is not to use the exact same image.

Step 3: How to remove watermarks from photos

At this stage, you will have to make one of the following decisions:

  • I can't buy the original picture
  • I can't find a picture without a watermark
  • I can't find another picture that makes sense.

Now you have already decided that you want to learn how to remove watermarks from a picture and this will be the simplest solution.

It's decided. Let's spend our time and figure out how to get rid of two types of watermarks. Below you will see how you can solve the problem with each of them.

Cut out small watermarks

There are many images that are watermarked without taking up much space. Here's what it might look like:

And in most cases, the quickest solution is to simply remove the area where the watermark is located. Depending on its location, you may lose small area pictures, but the essence will not change:

The quickest and crudest way to accomplish this is to take a screenshot. On Windows, users can use the Snipping Tool feature, and users operating system Mac, use keyboard shortcut command+shift+4 to activate screen capture tools. Mac users can then also use the Preview feature to crop out part of the image.

Well, if you still decide to take advantage of all the benefits of Photoshop, here's how to do it:

Look on the toolbar for various buttons. Use the Frame button and move the area below to cut off the unnecessary part, and then press ENTER.

For more complex cases use the filling function

Photoshop (CS5 and later) has a feature called "Fill" that is great for these cases. It is, of course, far from ideal, but it allows you to speed up the work process significantly. Please remember that our goal is to be fast and quality enough to use.

This function allows you to convert photos with more complex watermarks, like those shown in the picture:

And convert them to this:

This is a fairly quick process and will take about 3 minutes. Such a rough image conversion is quite controversial, since it is suitable in most cases, but nevertheless, if you look closely at the cleaned image for more than a couple of seconds, you can see some flaws in certain places.

Here are the functions we will use to work:

1. Use a rectangular marquee or lasso to select an area of ​​the picture

You should tackle the simplest areas first. Don't try to select the entire watermark, do it step by step, this way you can have better control over the process and also perform undo operations rather than starting all over again. Additionally, you may find that after editing individual parts sign, the picture becomes acceptable, and you no longer need to waste time on processing.

The Rectangular Marquee command allows you to select areas in the form of a rectangle, while the Lasso command allows you to select any shape. The “Scale” command allows you to zoom in or out of an image. To edit, I used the Lasso function and started from the top left corner:

2. Editing the area

After selecting the area, go to the Editing section in the toolbar and select Fill from the drop-down list. A dialog box will appear as shown in the picture. All you have to do is click OK and the program will do everything necessary itself.

As you work, you may notice minor errors, but you can use the undo function and select the area again, slightly changing the selection of the area, until you reach desired result. Try to keep the area you select as close to the edges of the watermark as possible.

The filling process is shown below as an animation:

This way you can repeat the process until you clear the entire image and the process of how to remove watermarks from a picture will be longer, but you won’t have to pay money for desired image, which is available for a fee.

And in conclusion, there is information for those who have long wanted to learn how to make money from affiliate programs and choose a profitable niche for making money. Just recently a wonderful one came out free course on the topic of making money on affiliate programs for beginners. Even if you have never encountered the technical nuances of promoting affiliate programs, in just a couple of evenings you will be able to master the practice of working with affiliate programs and be able to make a profit! Briefly, the lessons included in this course:

  • theory of affiliate programs
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And that’s all for me, I hope the article will help you find and edit any pictures that you need for your work.

For what beautiful pictures and pictures on the Internet are spoiled by watermarks? How to remove these translucent inscriptions?

Firstly, you need to understand why watermarks are placed in the first place. The watermark is the most effective method protect a photograph or drawing from use. Watermarks are ideal for designers, photographers, and artists to protect their work from theft.

On the one hand, watermarks do not interfere with viewing the image, on the other hand, it is extremely difficult to remove the protection, and no one will use crossed out pictures with other people’s contacts.

Most often, photos with watermarks sell. By paying for a work of art you will receive it without protection and full moral right to use it for your own purposes.

Sometimes photographs are not sold, but watermarks are added for marking purposes, for the author's signature, or to indicate the source. Typically this is placed at the edge of the image and does not block views.

No matter how trivial it may sound, but the very first and most The best way removing watermarks is buying the work. Think about how long it will take you to create something like this? Most likely for similar work you would ask no less than what it is worth to you. Any work must be paid.

In addition, you can only remove a watermark manually by sketching the background underneath it, and this is a very labor-intensive process.

Either you spend money and get quality product with the right to use it, or a large number of labor and a mutilated image, without the right to use it.

Therefore, by paying money for someone else’s work, you get the full right to use the work for your own commercial projects. Today, the largest service for selling photographs, drawings, videos and even music is

Buying one image is always more expensive than a set or an annual subscription.

Retouching

If you don't want to buy an image, but want to remove the watermarks manually, then you will need Photoshop, a lot of time and minimal artistic skills.

When the image has a grid dotted with logos, or the logo is located right in the center, then it needs to be sketched with a background lying around it. To do this, Photoshop uses retouching tools. For example, .

Hold down the ALT key and show a similar area to the one that lies under the watermark. And then paint it over.

There are two more very convenient automatic tools: the Patch Tool and the Spot Healing Brash Tool.

Using a “spot” brush, just paint over the icon and it will disappear. And “Patch” - circle the watermark and drag it to where it is not.

As mentioned above, such a sketch is very labor-intensive. One image can take up to several hours of jewelry work. And even after this, the image will not look like the original one at the protection site. Therefore, it is worth making an effort in the beginning to contact the author of the image and buy.

For example, microsinks are mainly protected by mesh, which is difficult to remove. In the image you can find the name of the stock and the picture number.

What if the work is not sold and the logo or inscriptions are placed for other reasons? In this case, following methods they will help you:

Crop image

If the image only has a small logo in the corner, try simply cropping it by making the image smaller. Surely nothing important will be lost.

If the integrity of the image is important, try painting the logo as a background using the retouching tools described in the previous step.

Draw a picture

This method is only suitable for vector drawings. If the image is vector and not complex, it will be easier than covering up the watermarks:

In other cases, it is enough to increase the “Levels” in Photoshop so that the watermark disappears completely. Simply put, you need to cut off the range of gray pixels by setting the sliders as shown in the figure.

Naturally, this technique is only suitable for black and white images, where cutting off the range with gray pixels will not affect the picture in any way. But at the intersections there is still a stain left on the neck of the guitar.

Watermarks in Microsoft Word

To remove a watermark in the program Microsoft Word 2016 click - Design/Background/Remove backing.

Sometimes, a watermark refers to headers and footers. To delete them, you need to double-click and erase the text or delete the picture.

Removing watermarks in PDF

Full editing of a PDF file is only available in Adobe Acrobat. For this he has special tool- Edit PDF.

So, Lately A lot of pictures on the Internet are protected with a watermark (aka Watermark). It is not clear why they do this, because there is almost no sense in it. A watermark does not give you copyright on the image, and if it contains a link, less than 0.1% of people will still enter it.

The reasons for removing Watermark can be different, and now I will tell you how to remove a watermark from a photo quickly and without problems. We only need one program, 8-10 megabytes in size, called Inpaint. At the time of writing (see date) of this article, latest version 6.2.

Inpaint interface and functionality

The program is simple, there is nothing complicated in the interface. Inpaint is actually designed to remove watermarks from images and photographs, but if you wish, you can cut out any object.

All we need to do is to select with a marker or other tool the area from which we will remove unnecessary elements, after which we use the same marker to select the donor, that is, the area from which the data will be selected to be filled.

It is best, of course, to remove them where the background is uniform, but if the watermark is located right in front of a person’s eyes, then complications can arise.

Actually, watch this video, here I will show you how to remove a watermark from any picture. I myself applied two watermarks to the image, one in the form of a transparent picture, the other in the form of an inscription. It turned out a little crooked, but overall Inpaint coped with the task.




Example of how the algorithm works

Tali Dekel/YouTube

Researchers from Google Research have developed an algorithm to automatically remove watermarks from stock images. Since such images typically have the same watermark, an algorithm based on many such images can calculate its outline with high accuracy and then cut it out without leaving a trace. At the same time, the researchers proposed a defense against such illegal acquisition of images - to create a unique watermark for each image with slight differences. The study is reported on the company's blog.

Many sites, including the media, do not hire their own photographers, but use the services of photo banks - special sites that collect millions of photographs at the most various topics. To allow the user to evaluate the photo before purchasing, many of these sites show the photo in reduced resolution with a watermark applied. It doesn't interfere much when selecting an image, but it can be difficult to remove due to its translucency.

Researchers from Google showed fundamental vulnerability most photo banks. The fact is that usually a photo stock site uses the same watermark for all images. Since watermarks often consist of many symbols and lines, it is quite problematic to determine it qualitatively from one image. Developers at Google solved this problem by feeding the algorithm a lot of images. It found matches in images and turned them into a signal and the rest of the image into noise. Thus, based on hundreds of images, the algorithm obtained the exact contours of the watermark and its transparency. Having this data remove the watermark in automatic mode no problem.


Researchers have demonstrated the successful operation of the algorithm on popular photo banks such as Adobe Stock or Fotolia. But the goal of the work was to create protection against this method of obtaining images. To do this, the researchers tried several options. Randomly moving the watermark or its transparency had virtually no effect on the algorithm's performance. However, it turned out that even an almost invisible random distortion of the contours of a watermark, for example the contours of fonts, causes the appearance of many noticeable defects in the final image. The more changes made, the more difficult it became for the algorithm to remove the watermark. The researchers hope that their work will help photo bank owners combat piracy more effectively.

Google researchers are not the first to propose using randomness to protect against piracy or counterfeiting. For example, British scientists decided to protect documents by randomly distributing cellulose fibers in paper into a digital key unique to every sheet in the world. And Korean scientists use random processes at the micro level to create unique and unforgeable identifiers.

Grigory Kopiev

In this article we will look at what tools you can use to remove watermarks from photos. online service mi and applications. The problem is known to designers and artists, where to get good images, but what you like is almost always paid for and protected by a watermark; in the article we will look at how to remove it.

Search by images in Google and Yandex

In 50% of cases the method helps. Go to google or yandex and click search by image. In Google and Yandex the procedure looks like this:

Download the photo and use it for your own purposes. If there are no options, then we move on to processing the pictures.

Webinpaint is the best at removing watermarks from images

A modern and reliable service has appeared, which is disguised as a photo editor, but its main focus is removing watermarks. Go to webinpaint and click download. There are two ways:

  1. Drag and drop from folders on your computer
  2. Open the explorer by pressing the button

Next, we find a marker or another one of those presented. We adjust the radius and scale of the photo, and draw in the place where there is a watermark. To remove, click “erase”

As you can see, it has moved away, not quite directly, but it intelligent system, which determines how to combine pixels, for better results, it is better to use desktop programs.

Free online editor programs (similar to Photoshop)

For more detailed processing we use free online editors, similar to Photoshop, having a stamp and a healing brush. I settled on two sites:

  • Pixlr
  • Photopea

Using a stamp

I’ll look at the first one, because it’s in Russian, go to pixlr and download it.

We select a stamp, it replaces the area with another one that the user has defined himself (those who know Photoshop don’t have to read it). We assign the area from which the sample is taken, I will take the section of hair closest to the watermark while holding down the cntrl button, the sight sign will appear, release the key and online program will remember the position from where to remove the sample, I advise you to set the brush to 21, which is not too hard, look at the screenshot below.

Since our hair will move up and down, we don’t press any keys, just the left mouse button. As a result, we get this.

Spot brush

Similar to the previous one, only it does not need to set a starting point, it takes pixels at the edges and brings them to the middle, located here.

The tool is good when the area that needs to be removed is monochromatic, or with similar colors; on a multi-colored shelf it will not perform well; a stamp will help to make it better.

I will not consider the second Photopea site (a clone of the Photoshop utility), it is similar and the entire panel has the same names and icons, you won’t miss it. Detailed analysis How .

Remove a watermark by cropping a photo online in Pixlr

If the watermark is simply located in the corner, then the picture can be cropped if the area in which it is located is not important. Any editor can handle it, the same two online services that were discussed above, here’s an example.

Bottom line

As you can see, removing a watermark from any photo is not difficult, but it takes a lot of time online, but for free. Use the second intelligent transformation method if the image is simple; if it is complex, you will have to try more carefully.